Musings of an OOPSLA elder

I don’t think of myself as an “elder”. But that is what Linda Rising, who led the 20th OOPSLA retrospective, labeled those who were at the first OOPSLA. I am one of five who received a perfect attendance ribbon (Allen Wirfs-Brock, Brian Foote, Ralph Johnson and Ed Gehringer are the others) for having attended all OOPSLAs. At the very first OOPSLA I felt like an outsider. I wondered how I could get involved with this conference. Excitement was in the air. Objects were the next big idea. Just exactly what could I do that would have an impact? My paper on Color Smalltalk was rejected (the reviewers’ commented that it talked too much about hardware details) so I presented it as a poster. It was good that they rejected it. Our work was premature. Three years later, when Tektronix Color Smalltalk was finally a product, I wrote a paper about the design principles and class libraries in Color Smalltalk that was accepted. This success made me believe in my writing abilityand led to my paper with Brian Wilkerson on Responsibility-Driven Design in 1990…and thus launched my enduring interest in design.

Thursday I had another elder moment. Iwas on a panel with Ed Yourdon, Larry Constantine, Grady Booch, Kent Beck, and Brian Henderson-Sellers that looked back at echoes of the past and structured design and into the future. Larry Constantine provoked us to bring theory, technique and transparent tools into all we do. Kent brought the house down by quoting from Structured Design. He noted that while Ed and Larry got a lot right, they missed out on the fact that systems need to change. Refactoring wasn’t part of Ed and Larry’s vocabulary. Ed, who has been an expert witness on software cases for the past few years, noted that there often isn’t even a shred of a plan or design or any documentation for software systems. Grady mentioned that increasing abstractions have been a big factor and challenged us to move to even further levels of abstraction. More down to earth, I spoke about how objects enabled me to think clearly…and that the power of abstraction, encapsulation, and thinking in terms of small neighborhoods of collaborating, responsible objects as a big step forward. What’s next? To me, it seems that even more effective methods and practices, powerful development and testing environments, expressive languages, patterns, and thinking tools are in our future. Innovation in our industry is a constant. Yet every once in a while it is good to reflect on what we got right and remember influences from the past. But I’m forward looking too. After every OOPSLA I come home charged with new ideas and the urge to do more, collaborate, and continue learning. What a blast!